Friday, 26 March 2010

In Burkina Faso, there is new commitment to improving obstetric care and family planning.

As many as six women die every day in the West African country Burkina Faso as a result of pregnancy or childbirth. Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world, and human rights group, Amnesty International, says it is the country's poor, rural women whose lives are most in danger.

Amnesty International issued a report last month that pointed to poverty and shortages of supplies and trained medical staff as well as corruption and gender discrimination as the underlying causes for high rates of maternal death in Burkina Faso.

A 2005 law gives Burkinabé women the right to choose how many children they will have and when they will have them, and government subsidies introduced in 2006 sharply reduced the cost of childbirth.

But Amnesty International found that many women do not know about their right to family planning and that poorly paid medical personnel continue to ask for informal payments with impunity.

(snip)

The Burkinabé government also committed Friday to lifting financial barriers to family planning services, which Amnesty International says can save lives by preventing unwanted pregnancies, pregnancies that are too close together and unsafe, illegal abortions.

Wiki says it is 60% Muslim but calls it 'ethnically integrated, secular'. So, at least they don't have civil war and ethnic strife to deal with.

They're trying to raise the status of women there, but still need help.

Amnesty International has also encouraged international donors to continue their support of the Burkinabé government in ensuring the availability and accessibility of adequate reproductive care for women in Burkina Faso.

Some mullahs in Afghanistan are distributing condoms. Others are quoting the Quran to encourage longer breaks between births. Health experts say contraception is starting to catch on in a country where one in eight women dies during pregnancy.

Afghanistan has one of the world's highest fertility rates, averaging more than six babies per woman despite years of war and a severe lack of medical care. Awareness of, and access to, contraceptives remains low among many couples, with UNICEF estimating 10 percent of women using some form of birth control.

But use of the pill, condoms and injected forms of birth control rose to 27 percent over eight months in three rural areas — up to half the woman in one area — once the benefits were explained one-on-one by health workers, according to the report published Monday in Bulletin, the World Health Organization's journal.